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Released on January 8, 2016 via DNAWOT Records
Londoners HAG like to describe their sound as ‘Eagle metal’, which undeniably sounds pretty awesome, but does raises a few questions. Firstly, what kind of eagle are we talking about? The crowned solitary eagle? Perhaps the South Nicobar serpent eagle? Or maybe the the black-chested buzzard-eagle is more fitting for their particular strain of metal? Secondly, why aren’t there any metal bands harvesting the Wikipedia page on eagles for band names? That place is a gold mine.
Whichever it is, it’s quite apt as eagles famously take around 5 1/2 years to build a nest, which is coincidentally precisely the amount of time it took HAG between releasing their promising début EP and their first full length album. Ok, so that’s not a fact in the strictest sense of the word, but I’ve no idea what else could explain them taking so long to get around to getting this out into the wild. Whatever it was now that the iron has long gone cold and the fuse needs replacing they’ve finally struck. Thankfully it was, just about, worth the wait.
Things start slowly and gloomily on the title track, sounding like Soundgarden at their most miserable, but when they get going there’s a heavy debt to High on Fire on display. Once ‘Kingdom O’ is in full sway the drums rumble on like the pounding hooves of charging cavalry and the riffs come tumbling like a drunk through a pub toilet door, sounding not unlike Harvey Milk in their punky hell-for-leather mode. There’s something decidedly British about their take on this sort of thing (despite being 1/3 Hungarian and 1/3 Swedish) however – if fellow Melvins disciples Big Business had been brought up here they might have wound up sounding something like HAG. The stoner assault and battery of ‘Kingdom O’ is punctuated with mildly deranged rambling through a megaphone that sounds like something Future of the Left might be responsible for. And once the crusty punk whirlwind of ‘Rainbow Dust’ has blown itself out it all goes a bit incestuous saucy postcard: “When I make love to your brother/I really think about your mum/then I sit down with your father/talk about the things I’ve done.”
While the filthy racket they produce, ably captured by Part Chimp’s Tim Cedar, is easy to fall for singer/guitarist Ian Baigent’s vocals may prove a divisive factor, his slightly nasal delivery and constipated howl potentially irritating as many as it delights. Personally I found myself playing with the EQ to bury him further in the wall-to-wall riffery on some tracks. ‘Trauma Yauma’ for instance features some of the most straight up High on Fire tidal wave of metal action, but the vocals stop it from being an album highlight. When he repeatedly spits, “we think you talk too much,” toward the end I can’t help but think of glass houses.
But his riffcraft is more than enough to make up for any vocal shortcomings. Few will come to Fear of Man expecting mellifluous tones anyway – they’ll be wanting filth, they’ll be wanting power, they’ll be wanting riffs by the damn barrel full. And when the three piece lock into the slightly off-kilter shuffling groove of ‘Low’ or the thuggish chugging of ‘White Lion’ they won’t be disappointed. It’s 9 tracks might start to blur together by the end of the record, but by the time ‘Wrong Bar’ rolls around and Baigent is lamenting, “What’s a grown man to do?” HAG will have you wanting to track them down at whatever dive bar they’re playing in and find out how massive this all sounds live. There’s much to enjoy on Fear of Man – we can only hope they don’t keep us waiting so long before they release a follow up.
